Samuel Langhorne Clemens (pen name Mark Twain) was born on November 30, 1835 in Florida, Missouri. Twain is considered the greatest humorist of 19th Century American literature. His novels and stories about the Mississippi River: "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" (1876) and "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (1894) are still popular with modern readers.

In 1839 the Clemens family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, on the Mississippi River where young Sam experienced the excitement and colorful sights of the waterfront. Like many authors of his day he had little formal education. His education came from the print shops and newspaper offices where he worked as a youth. In 1853 Clemens left Hannibal with a yearning to travel. On a trip to New Orleans he persuaded a riverboat pilot to teach him his skill.

The cover of the first edition of Adventures of Hu...

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Drawing of Huckleberry finn with a rabbit and a gu...

By the Spring of 1859 Clemens was a licensed riverboat pilot.

At the outbreak of the American Civil War (1861) Clemens chose not to get involved and moved to Carson City, Nevada. After an unsuccessful attempt at gold and silver mining he joined the staff of a newspaper in Virginia City, Nevada. He first wrote under the pen name, "Mark Twain" (meaning "two fathoms" in riverboat-talk) in 1863. "Twain" wrote his first popular story, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" in 1865.

He continued to travel as a correspondent for various newspapers, and in 1869 his travel letters from Europe were collected into the popular book, "The Innocents Abroad." Encouraged by his success Twain married Olivia Langdon and settled down in Hartford, Connecticut to his most productive years as a writer. Between 1873 and 1889 he wrote seven novels including his Mississippi River...

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... The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a book celebrating boyhood in a town on the Mississippi River, was published in 1867; A Tramp Abroad, published in 1880, describes a walking trip through the Black Forest of Germany and the Swiss Alps. Along with four other books, Twain wrote his adventurous ...

... Adventures of Huckleberry Finn On November 30, 1835, Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in the town of Florida, Missouri. He had four siblings, three were older than him and one was younger. When Clemens was four, his family moved to the town of Hannibal, Missouri. Hannibal was a town located on the ...

... Twain conceived of what became Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the summer of 1875, began to write the following summer, and after long interruptions completed a manuscript with a rush in 1883. It was to be a boys' book, a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; yet even the ...

... Twain wrote the sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1884. The sequel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is considered by many to be Twain's masterpiece (Mark Twain 1). The book is the story of Tom Sawyer's best friend, Huck. He flees his father, the town drunk, by raft down the Mississippi ...

... The Civil War and the installation of the American railroad system [Kaplan 49]. After going out west and working in the frontier, Twain began writing in earnest. His most popular book, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn now stands as a primary example of the "the ...

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